Maybe you've just replaced a drive in your Mac and need to reinstall Yosemite, or perhaps you need to upgrade a Mac to the latest operating system without taking it online. Whatever your reason, there is a simple way to make a bootable drive of the OS X Installer so that you can easily update your operating system.

You’ve no doubt heard by now that Microsoft released the Windows 8 Consumer Preview last week, and maybe you were even one of the million users who downloaded it. If you’re still stuck on how to get it installed on your Mac, the folks at Parallels have arrived with help.

When Apple announces new products, it's time to search under those couch cushions for the to afford any of the new Macs and iOS devices. And with the advent of the iPad 2, surely you're fiending, thinking of a way to make some quick cash to obtain one of Apple's next-generation tablets for yourself. If you have some old Macs lying around, you're in luck, because they might be worth some cash. Follow along and we'll walk you through how to prepare your Mac for a resale.

The MacBook Air is a fantastic computing device, but its minimalist design and lack of optical drive could cause worry for those of us that are prone to losing things. While the Mac itself includes a tiny flash drive for reinstalling Mac OS X, those tiny little peripherals have a habit of becoming misplaced, and are not always with you when the situation calls for it. Using Disk Utility, you can easilly install Mac OS X, or even use the Apple Hardware Test with a piece of Utility software that comes preloaded on Snow Leopard. Follow along to find out how.

Mac OS X comes with many features, which can be beneficial to the user, but some of the features like printer drivers, additional language support, and other bundled software can take valuable disk space away from your Mac. Whether you have an older Mac with a smaller hard drive (or a new Mac), we’ll show you how to reinstall OS X and limit the installation size, giving you more room to grow in your digital world.

Apple was busy overnight making a few very welcome changes to the App Store interface for the iPad. In addition to new search filters, users can now see which apps have been purchased previously but aren’t currently installed on your device.

As if war, famine and inequality weren't enough to bring us down, Mac users also have to live with the knowledge that some poor souls have no choice but to crazy up their hard drives with secondary operating systems. Where Windows is concerned, many Mac users opt to use OS X's free Boot Camp partitioning software to make their Mac a lean, mean dual-booting machine. Unfortunately, doing so means you'll be losing a significant amount of the hard drive space that was once available to your Mac. A less hard disk-hungry method for getting a secondary OS on to your Mac is to install it into a virtual machine, commonly known as a VM. By using a virtual machine application such as Parallels or VMware Fusion, Mac users can run set up as many VMs running any number of different operating systems on their computer as they want, and all from the comfort of OS X.

Santa may have been generous enough to bring you a new Mac for Christmas, but after firing it up and poking around a bit, you might be overwhelmed and not sure where to begin. Thankfully, MacLife.com is here with some ideas on how to spend Christmas Day (and beyond) with your new friend -- just consider us one of Santa’s friendly elves!